MAKING IT WORK

MAKING IT WORK; Today's Performing Arts Center for Today's Brooklyn

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Published: June 21, 1998

Correction Appended

THE Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College had an unexpected problem on its hands when the St. Petersburg State Ice Ballet came to perform at the Flatbush theater in November. It wasn't the 6,000 pounds of ice that threatened to sink the stage, but the long line at the box office.

The Independence Savings Bank, which sponsored the event, had sent bilingual fliers in Russian and English to depositors. For a week before the show, and on the night of the performance, the lobby was crowded with Russians, most of whom spoke no English, all clamoring for tickets and holding up deposit slips to get the discount the bank had promised. ''We had to hire a Russian-speaking box office person,'' said Julie Pareles, 39, the center's producing director.

Ms. Pareles and Alfred R. Fredel, the center's director of community outreach, have other such stories. Last year, for instance, an unexpected surge of Chinese ticket buyers showed up for a performance by the Red Star Red Army Chorus from Russia. The center had promoted the concert extensively among Brooklyn's large Russian population. But a Chinese newspaper had also listed the performance. ''Apparently the company had toured China for many years,'' Mr. Fredel said. ''It was kind of a nostalgia thing.''

It used to be that people went to the center, known as BCBC, to see the ballerina Margot Fonteyn dance in ''Cinderella'' or Pinchas Zukerman play his violin or the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon. For years, the BCBC theater, whose first season was in 1955, presented entertainment aimed at Manhattan ballet and music fans and a middle-class Brooklyn audience, mostly white and Jewish. All that has changed.

''Brooklyn is growing, Brooklyn is changing,'' Mr. Fredel, 30, said, noting that 27 different languages are spoken in the borough, which is home to 155 ethnic groups. The center, Ms. Pareles said, has responded to Brooklyn's demographic changes by giving its ethnic communities ''a cultural home.''

The 1998-99 season at BCBC will feature the San Francisco Western Opera Theater performing ''La Traviata,'' the Russian National Ballet of Moscow, the Jose Greco II Flamenco Dance Company and Yiddish theater by Seymour Rexsite, billed as the ''star of Second Avenue.'' But it will also include less traditional attractions, like Alicia Svigals, a young fiddler who made her name with the innovative Klezmatics group, and the Grammy Award-winning singer Adrienne Cooper, who will perform partisan songs of World War II. There will be ballet and ethnic dance from Puerto Rico, Senegal and Mexico, as well as Caribbean music and comedy and, for children, a Cuban circus. Single ticket prices range from $9 to $40, with mezzanine seats averaging $18.

The nonprofit center relies on ticket sales for 70 percent of its annual budget of $1.3 million. (The rest comes from corporate and foundation money, individual donations and BCBC members.) The mix of performers varies. ''The programs selected,'' Ms. Pareles said, ''are researched a great deal and are chosen to provide opportunities for building bridges with the community and reaching out to new audiences.''

As producing director, she picks the artists, but she does so with advice from BCBC staff and board members and community leaders. Audience surveys are an important part of the process. ''Audience members and potential audience members are consulted continually,'' said Ms. Pareles, whose brother Jon Pareles is the chief pop music critic of The New York Times.

BCBC has a seven-member community service department and a six-member marketing and development staff. Tickets for shows at the 2,500-seat house are sold in many places, from a ticket broker's office in Brighton Beach, where many Russians live, to the Golden Krust Bakery on West 23d Street in Manhattan, part of a chain that specializes in Jamaican patties, breads and sweets. Mr. Fredel and Ms. Pareles set up tables at street fairs throughout the city, coaxing passers-by to talk about what they'd like to see at the center. They haunt hip hangouts like the Knitting Factory in Manhattan to get a feel for young audiences' tastes.

They have also enlisted help in publicizing BCBC events from groups as varied as Sinovision Cable, a producer of Chinese television programs; Mexican amateur dance companies in Queens; the Brooklyn Jewish Brownstone Coalition, and the Union of Jamaican Alumni Associations USA Inc.

Their diligence seems to have paid off. Overall yearly attendance, Ms. Pareles said, is 150,000, reflecting a 7 percent increase during the last two seasons. And some of BCBC's programs are drawing bigger and bigger audiences. Attendance at a series of performances by Caribbean groups jumped from 2,000 to 10,000 in the last year and a half, Ms. Pareles said.

Ms. Pareles and Mr. Fredel are also seeing cultural crossover. For example, they said many Russians attended last season's tango program by the Argentine group Los Tangueros. Hispanic people, they said, seem to make up the largest crossover audiences, with wide-ranging cultural tastes like the Jewish audiences of years past.

''We've learned we can't think too broadly,'' Ms. Pareles said. ''We can't just program in a vacuum.'' Right now, the two are planning how to reach audiences in the city's Irish enclaves for next year's St. Patrick's Day concert. ''Gerritsen Beach awaits us!'' Mr. Fredel said happily.

Photos: At the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, Julie Pareles, third from left, and Alfred R. Fredel, standing at right, are among the staff members who are looking for ethnically diverse programming. The National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica performed recently. (Photographs by Philip Greenberg for The New York Times) Chart: ''MARQUEE: Packing Them In'' Top-selling performances at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College (718-951-4600) in the past year: SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK (educational children's show) Number of Shows -- 5 Tickets sold -- 10,000 PEKING ACROBATS Number of Shows -- 4 Tickets sold -- 8,600 NATIONAL DANCE THEATER COMPANY OF JAMAICA Number of Shows -- 5 Tickets sold -- 6,700 ST. PETERSBURG STATE ICE BALLET Number of Shows -- 2 Tickets sold -- 4,000 TAKE 6 (a cappella gospel group) Number of Shows -- -- 1 Tickets sold -- 1,800 JOEL GREY Number of Shows -- 1 Tickets sold -- 1,700

Correction: June 28, 1998, Sunday An article last Sunday about the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts misstated the number of managerial staff members. It is 8, not 13.